It’s time for WWW Wednesday again. That’s:

• What have you recently finished reading?
• What are you currently reading?
• What will you read next?

What have you recently finished reading?

I finally finished up reading Bettany Hughes’ The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I don’t know why the first 100 pages took me so long, and then just a couple of days for the last 200 pages, but here we are. Perhaps it was just getting into the right frame of mind for a slow and considered tour of the ancient world. I was quite surprised that Hughes linked basically all seven of the Wonders to Alexander the Great; I hadn’t thought about it that way before.

Fiction-wise, the last thing I finished was a review copy of Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements, which I’m still thoughtfully chewing on. It reminded me a little bit of Yoon Ha Lee’s work (particularly Ninefox Gambit), which took me a while to fully appreciate.

What are you currently reading?

Too many books at once, as usual! But just today I started on Across a Field of Starlight, by Blue Delliquanti. I read a really horrible review of it quite recently by another blogger, but the things they hated about it were things that I’m interested in: both main characters are non-binary, for example, and there’s quite a range of gender expression on-page. That blogger complained that the art is ugly because of that, but I quite like it, and I love that it doesn’t feel bound to showing characters in a whole other time and place with the same gendered characteristics people have now. Markers of gender have been very different in different societies at different times, after all, let alone in an intergalactic civilisation.

I also started on Alice Oseman’s Nick and Charlie, a novella that fits into the Heartstopper world. I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the last volume of Heartstopper, because it so far feels very continuous to Charlie’s feelings in volume 5…

What will you read next?

I’m thinking of picking up R. Austin Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris, a classic mystery novel featuring the disappearance of an archaeologist. I don’t know what it is about archaeology (too much Time Team as a kid?) but it’s always a draw. I’d also like to focus on some of the books I’ve put on the backburner, though, like the ones I mentioned in my Top Ten Tuesday spring TBR.

As ever, though, mostly I’ll follow my whims.

How about you, readers? Anything amazing open on your ereader or propped up against your cereal box?